


Kairos Night

by marcelo



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-22
Updated: 2018-11-22
Packaged: 2019-08-27 12:26:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16702528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marcelo/pseuds/marcelo
Summary: Bruce is thirty-five. That's problematic, and not in a "middle age crisis" way.





	Kairos Night

Tomorrow is Bruce's birthday. The Cave systems will signal you as the car returns, so for now you sit in the main kitchen, a cup of tea in front of you, and consider a question you only let yourself contemplate once a year, always on this night.

You don't know his age, and you don't think you know your own, either.

You could answer the question if a doctor asked, of course. It's not a manner of too few memories. You know your life, and his, better than anybody else. But between the life and the number, between the memories and the chronology, no congruence is possible. Too much, too quickly. Deaths, cataclysms, triumphs, change. Enemies and friends. Family gained and lost and gained again. 

Time too much out of joint to encompass so much. For the flesh to recover, for the mind to perform, not even ones as extraordinary as Bruce's.

Bruce cannot be thirty-five, and cannot be anything else. Neither can you be the age arithmetic and memory say you are. You were older than Thomas and Martha the day they made you promise to take care of their son if something happened to them. Now he's a grown man who has raised his own sons and seen some leave. You should be moving carefully around the kitchen, perhaps an active gardener, not coordinating Batman's logistics infrastructure and occasionally taking down a ninja with your bare hands, no matter how well-trained you were. There are too many memories between then and now. Too many nights and not nearly enough years.

You have stopped trying to map events to years, to make sense of the past or plan for the future. And you haven't raised the issue with Bruce. If you know, he knows. There are many things he has made himself blind to, one of the many things you blame yourself for, but the way his soul is called to mysteries is even older than his pain. Perhaps deeper, for when he chose to turn himself into something impossible, he made it, above everything else, a detective. 

A soft chime indicates he's approaching the Cave's entrance. A single sound: he's not been injured too badly this time. Your shoulders relax so slightly you doubt even he would notice; the part of you who knows how impossible it is for a man to do what he does after the injuries you have seen him take is not the part who knows he is your son and fears losing him every night.

Unable to trust memory and time, you don't know how long the two of you have been doing this mad thing, or how long you still have to go. Perhaps forever. Maybe a punishment for his failure to save Gotham, or a punishment for his daring to try. Perhaps he thinks it a _tactical advantage_ , the pain as irrelevant as always. An eternal battle would just mean time to keep trying, the impossibility of success something he wills himself not to consider, the cost a pittance next to what he feels he owes for having survived.

Whatever this is, Purgatory, Hell, or simply the first and maddest of all the impossibilities he faces nightly, your son is here, so this is your place. A tray on one hand carrying food for Bruce to ignore (pushing the thought of its implausible steadiness for next years' birthday night) you walk down cold stairs too new to have been scrubbed of as much blood as they have.


End file.
